“If you’ve ever been in a major exercise, not to mention, an air-to-air war like Desert Storm, then you know that, in the heat of battle, there’s confusion, there’s all kinds of chaos, and ultimately a bandit is going to sneak through and you’ll find yourself basically engaged one-on-one with the bad guys in an old school kind of way.”.— Ward Carroll, veteran US Navy fighter pilot and author.This weekend, fans of Top Gun will be lining up to see the highly touted sequel to the successful 1986 film, starring Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, Kelly McGillis and Anthony Edwards..Not only was that film profitable — grossing US$356 million against a production budget of only US$15 million — it also boosted US Navy recruitment rates by a stunning 500%..Truth be told, I am a fan too — I even get emotional when Goose dies..While I have not seen the new film, Top Gun: Maverick, I can imagine it will have a lot of exciting scenes involving aerial dogfighting, that will make for excellent viewing in theatres, and, eventually on your big-screen TV at home..Knowing Tom Cruise and his demand for realism, it will be realistic as it can be..But despite Hollywood blockbusters showcasing aerial dogfights, they have, in fact, almost vanished from modern warfare..In the 20th Century, skilled pilots who clocked up kills were often referred to as aces. The US considers a pilot with at least five confirmed kills to be an ace — but no serving pilot holds the title..Are the days of aerial dogfighting over?.The argument tends to center around modern 5th generation fighters such as the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), thanks to their combination of data-fusing situational awareness and low observability, according to report from Alex Hollings, at Sandboxx online..There’s certainly value in that assertion, but the truth is the vast majority of fighters in the sky today still come from the non-stealthy 4th generation, and that’s not going to change soon.."The era of dogfighting is largely over," Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told BBC News.."After the totally lopsided kill-to-loss ratio attained by the US Air Force and US Navy during the First Gulf War, it is a very rare thing for regimes under attack by the US and its allies to send fighters up in defence — since they know how it will end."."Even in the latter stages of the First Gulf War, many Iraqi pilots chose to fly their aircraft to Iran to escape certain destruction — no light decision, soon after the brutal Iran-Iraq war.".We have to go all the way back to 2017 to note the most recent air-to-air kill scored by an American aircraft, when a US Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet shot down a Syrian-flagged Su-22 in Raqqa province, Sandboxx reported..The interaction wasn’t much of a dogfight, but it was the first air-to-air engagement carried out by an American fighter since Operation Allied Force over Kosovo in 1999..In fact, the last time American aircraft truly found themselves in some serious mid-air scraps was in 1991, over Iraq..Throughout that brief conflict, the US lost five F-16 Fighting Falcons, two F-15 Eagles, two F/A-18 Hornets, one F-14 Tomcat, and one F-4G Wild Weasel, Sandboxx reported..The F-117 Nighthawk, on the other hand, took on the most dangerous air operations of the conflict, flying unaccompanied into Bagdhad, which was arguably the most heavily defended city on earth at the time … and didn’t lose a single airframe despite waltzing around enemy airspace at a leisurely 600 miles per hour..With more than three decades now separating today’s aviators from America’s last dogfights and stealth increasingly becoming the norm, it’s no wonder the Department of Defence seems to be leaning away from the idea that air-to-air combat in close quarters should be a priority..After more than two decades of conducting counter-terror operations around the world, the vast majority of America’s aviators and even senior leaders have spent the entirety of their careers operating in uncontested airspace, Sandboxx reported..Furthermore, senior defence officials seem to agree that America’s next air superiority fighter may have more in common with the B-21 Raider than the F-22, as the Pentagon moves away from the idea that close-in dogfights will decide the future fate of the skies..Instead, the focus seems to be on ensuring air superiority platforms have “first-shot opportunity.”.With advanced fighters like the F-35 finding homes in hangars across at least 15 nations and both Russia and China touting their own 5th generation entries’ ability to engage opponents under a cloak of low observability, tech trends are clearly moving toward longer-range engagements..And although things like Basic Fighter Maneuvers and Advanced Fighter Maneuvers are still a common part of the fighter pilot syllabus, pilots continue to credit these training exercises as a good way to learn the capabilities — and limits — of their aircraft..As a former pilot, I definitely see the logic in this..To quote the great Chuck Yeager: "The best pilots fly more than the others; that's why they're the best.".The F-22 Raptor, sometimes described technologically as "a dinosaur in an Apple watch," can still scrap with the best of them, even though the more logical approach would still be to play its long-range advantage..Again, it's about who sees who first. Simple, but in dogfighting, it counts..“The Raptor is about as cool as it gets, and it is the greatest air superiority fighter the world has ever seen, but like the F-15C that it was originally designed to replace it is an airplane without a real mission in modern conflict,” Air Force F-16 pilot Rick Scheff famously claimed in an online discussion..“When was the last time an American fighter killed another fighter in an air-to-air engagement? Go look it up, I’ll wait.”.Dogfights have changed dramatically over the decades of air warfare and are sure to continue to change, but the most recent engagements on record didn't resemble the tight-turning gun runs of the Vietnam War, where the USAF loss rate in Route Pack Six, around Hanoi and Haiphong, was one aircraft per 40 sorties..Even though US pilots and aircraft were clearly superior over Vietnam, the small, quick-turning MiGs proved to be formidable opponents. American airmen shot down 196 MiGs — 137 by the Air Force, 59 by the Navy and the Marine Corps — and sustained 83 losses, Air Force Magazine reported..An Air Force report from 1966 noted that “on several occasions US fighters found that by the time visual identification of the MiG had been made they were no longer in the prescribed missile launch or range envelopes. The engagement then became a short-range maneuvering encounter, which further compounded the problem of accurate missile launch.”.That's a far cry from the Second World War, when the Army Air Forces awarded more than 15,000 aerial victory credits, or the Korean War, in which Air Force F-86s shot down 792 MiG-15s and achieved an exchange ratio of better than 10-to-1..According to Lt. Col. David "Chip" Berke, the only US Marine to fly both the F-22 and the F-35, the public has a lot of learning to do when assessing a jet's capability in warfare, he told The Business Insider.."The whole concept of dogfighting is so misunderstood and taken out of context," Berke said.."There is some idea that when we talk about dogfighting it's one airplane's ability to get another airplane's 6 and shoot it with a gun ... That hasn't happened with American planes in maybe 40 years," Berke said.."Everybody that's flown a fighter in the last 25 years — we all watched Top Gun.".But planes don't fight like that anymore, he said, and comparing different planes' statistics on paper and trying to calculate which plane can get behind the other is "kind of an arcane way of looking at it.".The Air Forces says that the F-35, often called "a computer with wings," can take out a plane miles beyond visual range. It can pass targeting information to another platform, like a drone or a US Navy destroyer, and down a target without even firing a shot..Doubts about its dogfighting capabilities, have also been quashed with upgrades to the latest F-35A version..While all of that sounds very impressive, don't bother telling pilots of the Ukrainian Air Force that dogfighting is dead..Months into the fighting, one of the biggest surprises of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s failure to defeat the Ukraine's airmen, The New York Times reported..Military analysts had expected Russian forces to quickly destroy or paralyze Ukraine’s air defences and military aircraft, yet neither has happened. Instead, Top Gun-style aerial dogfights are now raging above the country..Ukraine's pilots are exhausted, the number of operational Su-27 fighter jets is dwindling, and Russia often has five times more aircraft in the air, yet officials claim the country’s military has shot down 97 fixed-wing Russian aircraft.."I only have to use my skills to win,” a Ukrainian fighter pilot named Andriy told the NYT..“My skills are better than the Russians. But on the other hand, many of my friends, and even those more experienced than me, are already dead.”.Clearly, the days of dogfighting, may not be over. As long as there is war, scraps are bound to happen.
